Many structured activities are managed by email. For instance, a consumer purchasing an item from an e-commerce vendor may receive a message confirming the order, a warning of a delay, and then a shipment notification. Existing email clients do not understand this structure, forcing users to manage their activities by sifting through lists of messages.
Studies have shown that email has evolved from simply a communications medium to a “habitat”—the primary interface to one's workplace, supporting tasks such as activity management, meeting scheduling, and file transfer. Yet today's email applications are still oriented towards manipulating individual messages. Though email is increasingly used to communicate about tasks and activities, today's clients provide minimal support for managing those activities.
One important class of email-based activity is participation in a structured processes or workflows. Many email messages are a manifestation of a user's participation in a business process. For instance, an employee in an organization with a centralized hiring process receives automatically-generated messages reminding her of an upcoming interview, requesting feedback on the candidate after the interview, and notifying her of the final decision. A manager receives a series of messages when his employee requests a new computer, after the request has been approved by the financial approver, and when the machine is ready for delivery. A consumer purchasing an item from an e-commerce vendor may receive messages that confirm the order, or notification of a delay or that the items have been shipped.
It has long been recognized that people use email to manage ongoing tasks, to-do lists, and reminders, even though it was originally designed as a simple communications application. One approach to help people manage email more effectively is the ReMail system (S. Rohall, D. Gruen, P. Moody, M. Wattenberg, M. Stern, B. Kerr, B. Stachel, D. Kushal, R. Armes, and E. Wilcox. “Remail: A reinvented email prototype.” In Proc. Conf Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2004.), which explores better visualization techniques for displaying message threads, and uses simple text analysis to extract important dates and message summaries.
Others have proposed task-centric user interfaces, such as Taskmaster (V. Bellotti, N. Ducheneaut, M. Howard, and I. Smith. “Taking email to task: The design and evaluation of a task management centered email tool.” In Proc. Conf Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2003.) and TaskVista (V. Bellotti, B. Dalal, N. Good, P. Flynn, D. Bobrow, and N. Ducheneaut. “What a to-do: studies of task management towards the design of a personal task list manager.” in Proc. Conf Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2004.), which help people organize email and other online information into task-specific groupings. However, while these systems group messages together, they do so only using standard message headers.